Emily Mary Osborn, who was born in 1828 and lived through 1925, was one of the most well known English painters of the Victorian era. The reason I chose Emily is because, like most the other women who had achieved getting any of their work displayed and known, she did not have a long career. Her dedication is what made want to explore her life beyond the textbook. Emily was born in Essex where she grew up was able to gain success quickly. Emily grew up surrounded by countryside at a residence at the top of Gun Hill.
She was oldest of the nine children in the family of a clergyman, which put a lot of financial stress upon her family. Emily’s’ mother, Mary Osborn, encouraged her to continue painting as her mother talent developing in her daughter at an early age through her paintings of her brother and sisters. She was fortunate enough that her parents possessed a love for painting and had encouraged Emily to pursue art as a form of making a living. She pursued an education as a painter at Dickinson’s Academy located in London, shortly after her family moved to London.
Though John Magford formally taught her, an resound artist, J. M. Leigh from Maddox Street, privately taught her and later she attended his academy in Newman Street for a year. Finally, at the age of seventeen, Osborn began showing her work. From the beginning of her career she was successful when showing her art being that her first showing was at the annual Royal Academy exhibit, at which she appeared all the way through 1893. Through the connections that she made at the art show, she made enough compensation from her art to add a small studio to where she lived at the time.
That same Royal Academy exhibit is what got Emily noticed to begin with, when in 1855 her artwork called “My Cottage Door” got noticed by Queen Victoria who purchased it that year. Emily did have other great works of art that are well known today, her works that specifically stand out are the pictures of children and women in distress. The work called “Nameless and Friendless” that she painted in 1857, was referred to as “The most ingenious of all Victorian widow pictures. ” It exploits a recently bereaved woman attempting to make a living as an artist by offering a picture to a dealer.
In this painting there is a brother and a sister that are featured and seem to be orphans and are trying to sell some artwork to get money for survival. (Art Finding Editors) On the left side we see two men looking at the woman in a snarky manner, objectifying her for being a woman. During the Victorian era, Osborn earned the designation of “proto-feminist artist. ” (Art Finding Editors) As an artist she was really motivated to portray women and women artists in her artworks in order to portray struggle that they undergo.
Like the other women artists, her biggest concern was with the issue of education and employment opportunities, more specifically the lack of them. Osborn did not just stop there, she continued creating works throughout her life, but none of those works, were enough to gain her recognition in the male dominant society. Due to this struggle, she was never granted a membership in the Academy and could not study in Royal Academy schools. Eventually her art cost her lack of children and husband in her life until she passed away at the age of 97, in 1925.
Jacqueline Marval was a Modernist era painter who was born in Grenoble in 1866, at that time also being under her real name Marie-Joseph Vallet. She was born into a family of two schoolteachers, which had a push on her career in that direction. As a French painter, lithographer, and sculptor, she was also a schoolteacher starting from 1884. During this time Marie-Joseph was going through a tough time given that the marriage with the first husband did not work and she had to get a divorce, at this time of Modernist era this was no new thing, more people got divorced with each year.
The reason for the divorce was a tragedy that happened in their family, the infant child died, which took a toll on Marie causing issues in the relationship. Once her marriage has completely fallen apart, she had to start making a living by making waistcoats. Couple years down the road the sadness started passing through and in the year of 1894, she met a painter Francois Joseph Girot, who later she moved with to Paris and lived with him as his lover. At this time Marie began to rise and take on painting in Paris.
The relationship between the two did not last long, as just the following year she met another painter Jules Flandrin. This time, the two had a connection and fell in love and Vallet decided to break things of with Girot. Shortly after she moved in with Flandrin, spending the next 20 years living with him as his mistress. When Vallet moved in with Flandrin, she took on painting classes at the studio of Gustavo Moreau, where she met significant people for her life: Matisse and Roualt. Vallet was really fascinated by the vibrant still lifes, which she chose to capture in her artwork.
Eccentric women in spectacular hats, groups of bathers, modern, colorful scenes of women and children on country outings are just a few examples of what you can expect from a Vallet oil painting. (Papilon gallery Editors. ) She began attempting to get her work noticed, which did not work so well at first as she was rejected form the 1900 Salon des Independants. Though she did not succeed right away, she did not give up hope, which led to a dozen paintings shown in that exhibition the following year under assumed pseudonym of Jacqueline Marval.
Her artwork caught an eye of the art dealer Ambroise Vollard, who ended up buying them all that year. (Art Finding Editors. ) At this time Marval was a member of the Societe Nationale des Beaux Arts. In 1902 Marval was in a group show at the Galerie Berthe Weill with Matisse, Marquet, and Flandrin, where she has made an appearance in the years to follow. (Papilon gallery Editors. ) In 1908 she was in a group exhibition with Metzinger, Marie Laurencin, and Flandrin, again at Galerie Berthe-Weill.
In 1909 she achieved her first exhibition at the Galerie Druet, where she showed regularly for many years alongside Rouault, Matisse, de la Fresnaye, and many other artists. She was a significant part in the first Salon d’Automne in 1903 along with Matisse. In 1911 at the Salon D’Automne, the critic Apollonaire said that Marval had the most interesting art that has participated in that years show. During the war she had an honor to look after the children of fellow artists who had been called to fight the battle, giving her a good relationship with many people.
My personal favorites of her work were the twelve paintings that were created in the there of Daphnis and Chloe. After a while she lost her interest in painting, rather she became interested in creation of modern art museums in Paris and Grenoble This was the last activities the partook in before she passed away in 1932 in Paris, leaving a legacy as a provocative and edgy, with mix of realism, Fauvism, and Expressionism. The contemporary artist that I selected is Liza Lou. She was born in 1969 in New York.
As she was beginning to become interested in art, Lou moved to Los Angeles for inspiration and eventually took a part time residence to live and work in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa. (White Cube Editors) This particular artist stood out to me because of her incredible dedication to art. She took on the challenge when everyone told her that it was a bad idea to pursue art. I admire her courage to create art in the form that is dear to her art, not only her works are fairly unique, but they also convey the feminism ideas that have been around reflecting on what the identity of women has been known for.
Liza Lou has been able to create what seems to be almost impossible works of art by taking the ideology of a modernist artist to a whole new level by creating 3-D art through small beads sawn together. Her first work named “Kitchen” was shown at the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York in 1996. (White Cube Editors) Since her first work was a success, Liza continued creating contemporary pieces to today. Lou enjoys spending hours upon hours in her studio in Los Angeles where her and her team continues to create the thing that Lou comes up with.
It all started when Lou was a child. She was born into a middle class family where her parents moved from living determinedly bohemian lives in Manhattan until 1965, to attending revival meetings and becoming born-again Christians. After this they burned all of their books and artworks and eventually moved to Minneapolis where Liza and her sister were surrounded by exorcisms and speaking in tongue. (Bagley). One summer trip in 1989 she saw Cathedrals in Florence and Venice, Italy.
Liza became fascinated by the mosaic and eventually, while she was attending San Francisco Art Institute in California, she walked into a bead store where she found her true calling in beads rather than paint. With the judgment of her peers and teachers, she left the Institute to go work independently on her breakthrough piece, “Kitchen. ” The whole inspiration for the Kitchen and other art work she produced came from Lous’ desire to take something mundane and fundamentally boring, such as her first piece an everyday kitchen, and transform it into something beautiful to rejoice over. ArtNet Editors)
Liza first caught an eye of a director of the New Museum in New York, Marcia Tucker. Marcia gave the first invitation to Liza to show off her work in 1996. Though the first art work took Lou almost six years to complete, selling it enabled her to create more pieces and Lou began her second major artwork “Backyard”, a suburban lawn composed of 250,000 individually beaded blades of grass.
Though her colorful early work has dealt with feminism and mass culture thematic, later pieces – such as Cell in 2006, dealt with an unsettlingly luminous re-creation of death-row and darker explorations of violence and confinement. Lous’ intent often seems either to glorify something humble or beautify something awful and tragic. (Bagley) Over the years her work has been displayed in a variety of different museum like Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, SCAD Museum of Art Georgia, Lever House New York, Bass Museum of Art Miami, and others.
In conclusion, we see that many women artists had their ups and downs throughout their professional career. Often times, those who were encouraged and supported, succeeded a lot better, than those who were not. I think that this takeaway can be set all throughout the history of women and feminism. This is why women fought for their rights to be an equal and not looked down upon as being uncapable to achieve the same great things as men can.